How to Become a Professional Website Designer in Lagos, Nigeria.

I know what you’re thinking, why Lagos Nigeria? why not some other state, country or the world as a whole.

The simple answer to that is, you have to start someone at least. I choose Lagos simply because we are a website design and development agency currently based in Lagos and Lagos state Nigeria has the highest number of small, medium and large businesses than anywhere else in Nigeria.

If you are looking to start a career as a professional website designer/developer, your initial website projects will be based on businesses within your locality so be sure you put that into consideration.

Before we get started, let us draw a distinction between Website Design and Website Development.

Website Design

This relates to visual aspects of websites or web pages, this is what people see and interact with when they visit any website. It involves the use of colours, layout structure, graphics to create a harmonic balance amongst the elements that make up a website.

Website Development

This, on the other hand, website development involves the logic that runs on the server to fetch and process records mostly stored in a database for presentation to the end user, which in this case, the website designer.

As you can see, a website designer plays an important role in a website creation cycle. They are responsible for how a website looks and feels, how people interact with it and what kind of emotion it evokes in people.

What you need to learn to become a professional website designer

I’ve heard people say you don’t need to learn how to code to become a good website designer, while this might be true to some extent, it is not 100% correct.

If you start learning website design by using tools like Wix and other do-it-yourself websites tool, you will become dependent on those tools without knowing how to make minor style changes.

To get started as a website designer here is what you need to learn

HTML

HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is the standard markup language for creating website pages and web applications. It’s a very easy language to learn and you will be up and running in no time. Here are some few resources to help you get started with HTML

CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a language that describes the style an HTML document should take. This includes everything from colours to font size, layout structure and much more. Like HTML, it is fairly easy to learn and get up and running with. Here are a few great resources to help you get started with CSS

JavaScript (Not Java)

Unlike HTML & CSS which are essential to learning website design, JavaScript, on the other hand, isn’t. JavaScript is the scripting language of the web. It’s used to create responsive user interaction and interfaces on web pages. You can build websites without needing a single line of JavaScript but if you’re aiming to become a professional website designer, you need to learn a little bit of JavaScript. Although it’s more difficult to learn than HTML & CSS combined, a little knowledge of JavaScript can be quite rewarding and adds the icing on the cake with your finished website design project. Here are some resources to help you get started with JavaScript

Final notes

Website designer as the name suggests are designers. They understand colour balance, layout, typography and how a fusion of all these elements creates a beautiful masterpiece. Don’t be scared if you don’t understand design as a whole, you can start learning by reading some design resources online and getting inspired by other peoples work. When you are able to combine website and design, what you end up with is ART. if you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below.